Conventional computer systems that operate software applications designed for interaction with users often provide a graphical user interface enabling such interaction. Some software applications are designed to perform network management to control and manage an interconnection of computer systems and other devices. Often such applications provide a graphical user interface to assist the operator in management of the network. The graphical user interface can include information relative to the structure and operation of the network (e.g., local area network “LAN”, wide area network “WAN”, storage area network “SAN”, etc.). Typically, conventional computer systems that employ graphical user interfaces can display these network structures as graphical objects or icons representing the physical and/or virtual resources contained within the network environment. A user may then access certain information regarding the network resources by selecting the desired network resource representation in a view of the graphical user interface.
Additionally, conventional graphical user interfaces are able to display a topology of a network. As an example, conventional computer systems can display a single network fabric of a storage area network in the graphical user interface that represents the network resources and interconnections between those resources in that fabric. Storage area network management differs from general network management in that storage area networks or SANs define an interconnection of host computer systems through one or more switches to storage devices such as disk drives that are either logical devices or physical entities. The data transmitted on SAN networks are input-output (I/O) requests for data. Generally, in a SAN a network fabric thus defines a set of one or more host computers that are mapped to storage devices via switch devices. Each host computer in a conventional network fabric typically operates software, sometimes referred to as an agent, that executes as a computer process for retrieving and transmitting status and diagnostic information pertaining to a resource to a central network management application. There may be many types of agents that collect data on many different types of SAN resources within a given fabric. In turn, the status and diagnostic information is transmitted, directly or indirectly by each agent, to a management computer system operating the graphical user interface as part of a network management application for display to the network manager (i.e. operator).